Germany counters new wave of anti-Semitism with visits to Nazi concentration camps such as the Sachsenhausen National Memorial in Oranienburg. (photo: Shutterstock.com)

“Neo-Nazis have been emboldened by the arrival of Alternative for Germany, the first far-right party to break into Parliament since World War II. And there are concerns that the recent absorption of more than a million immigrants, many from the Middle East and many Muslim, has inadvertently created incubators of a different kind of anti-Semitism,” writes New York Times Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold.

The recent absorption of more than a million immigrants, many from the Middle East and many Muslim, has inadvertently created incubators of a different kind of anti-Semitism.

The article describes the proposal by a Berlin state legislator of Palestinian heritage to make visits to former concentration camps mandatory. It describes the impact of a visit to the Sachsenhausen National Memorial in Oranienburg, Germany, the site of a former Nazi concentration camp, on a class of 10th-grade students from Berlin.

“It was not the execution wall or the electric fence or even the description of the smell of human flesh burning day and night that made the teenagers stop cold, ”Bennhold writes. “It was the bunk beds. In their wooden ordinariness, they spoke to the 10th graders visiting the former Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen as no history book had. ‘This is how they lived,’ whispered Damian, 15, his eyes taking in the tightly packed rows of ladderless three-level bunks.”

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